Kelsey Savage

In a candid black & white portrait, Kelsey, a White woman with long straight hair, swept across her brow in a side part, with freckles over the bridge of her nose, wears an open smile and a crew neck tshirt, with the beach behind her.
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Meet Kelsey Savage, sexual health geek and ‘Queer Cultural Attaché’, expanding the horizons of the disability services sector.

Current Title: Manager, Connecting Queer Communities; Project Developer, Real Talk

#sexual_health

#community_living

#education

#disability

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Kelsey Savage has worked in sexual health since 2014, in roles ranging from an elementary school sex ed teacher, to a Women’s Hospital sexual health clinic manager. Since 2018, she has been one half of the Real Talk team, facilitating sexual health pizza parties, training fellow sexual health educators, and equipping staff, family, and caregivers with the tools they need to approach sexuality support with curiosity, compassion, and joy.
Kelsey is the founder and manager of Connecting Queer Communities (CQC), a social health and community connection initiative aimed at 2SLGBTQIA+ people with intellectual disabilities, developed out of the learnings from her work with Real Talk. Since its launch in 2022, CQC has secured funding from the Disability Alliance of BC (DABC), Pride and Remembrance Foundation (PRF), and Degrees of Change (DoC).
A woman with long straight hair, bangs, glasses, in a long white skirt with a vintage floral design (Kelsey), stands on the edge of a stage. Her hand i on the back of another woman, facing away from us, and a man in a cap with a grey pony tail holds the woman's other hand. They are backlit by the house lights. And audience is rising from their seats, beyond.
Photo credit: Galen Robinson-Exo, Bowline Photography
Kelsey’s Strengths
  • Centering 2SLGTQIA+ disabled voices in program design
  • Building organizational systems to lessen social work burnout
  • Designing responsive pro-d to lead supporters through vulnerable conversations
  • Capturing challenging topics and making them accessible to wider audiences
Kelsey’s background
  • A writer, performer, and public speaker on the craft of poetry. She got her start on the Vancouver Poetry Slam’s city teams, in spoken word mentorship programs, and travelling across the Lower Mainland to run poetry workshops in high schools.
  • A recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts grant, which she’s using to support writing her first ever novel.
  • Holds a BFA from the University of British Columbia
Nine people are seated in a row on stage, below a screen that reads Vancouver Queer Film Festival with an image by Charlene Johnny of a bird with a wreath of leaves in its beak. Kelsey, with long red hair, bangs, and glasses, holds the mic and gesticulates.

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